每日简报

SelectionBias：计算因果目标量选择偏差界的 R 包AI 解读

Selection bias may arise when there are dropouts or missing data in the analysis, or when subjects are included or excluded in the analysis based upon some selection criteria for the study population. Selection bias can jeopardize the validity of the study and a sensitivity analysis for assessing the effect of the selection is desired. Recently, there has been a surge of results for selection bias in causal inference, with several suggestions for sensitivity analyses. One…

具有因果解释的随机效应元分析AI 解读

Recent work has made important contributions in the development of causally-interpretable meta-analysis. These methods transport treatment effects estimated in a collection of randomized trials to a target population of interest. Ideally, estimates targeted toward a specific population are more interpretable and relevant to policy-makers and clinicians. However, between-study heterogeneity not arising from differences in the distribution of treatment effect modifiers can…

未测混杂下 PreventS 试验平均处理效应的贝叶斯推断AI 解读

Using the PreventS trial data, our objective is to estimate average effects of a Health Wellness Coaching (HWC) intervention on improvement of cardiovascular health at 9 months post randomization and in three consecutive 3-month periods over 9 months post randomization. Conventional approaches, including instrumental variable models, are not applicable in the presence of multiple correlated multivalued exposures and unmeasured confounding. We propose a causal framework and…

以深度学习时间序列因果推断量化北极放大的成因AI 解读

The warming of the Arctic, also known as Arctic amplification, is led by several atmospheric and oceanic drivers. However, the details of its underlying thermodynamic causes are still unknown. Inferring the causal effects of atmospheric processes on sea ice melt using fixed treatment effect strategies leads to unrealistic counterfactual estimations. Such models are also prone to bias due to time-varying confoundedness. Further, the complex non-linearity in Earth science data…

随机拥堵下的实验设计与估计AI 解读

We study randomized experiments in a service system when stochastic congestion can arise from temporarily limited supply or excess demand. Such congestion gives rise to cross-unit interference between the waiting customers, and analytic strategies that do not account for this interference may be biased. In current practice, one of the most widely used ways to address stochastic congestion is to use switchback experiments that alternatively turn a target intervention on and…

高维协变量下局部平均处理效应的识别稳健推断AI 解读

This paper presents an inference method for the local average treatment effect (LATE) in the presence of high-dimensional covariates, regardless of the strength of identification. We propose an orthogonalized Anderson-Rubin test statistic that maintains uniformly valid asymptotic size. We provide an easy-to-implement algorithm for inferring the high-dimensional LATE by inverting our test statistic and employing the double/debiased machine learning method. Simulation results…

利用因果生存森林估计右删失数据中的异质性处理效应AI 解读

Forest-based methods have recently gained in popularity for non-parametric treatment effect estimation. Building on this line of work, we introduce causal survival forests, which can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in a survival and observational setting where outcomes may be right-censored. Our approach relies on orthogonal estimating equations to robustly adjust for both censoring and selection effects under unconfoundedness. In our experiments, we find…

何时可以忽略运行变量中的测量误差AI 解读

In many applications of regression discontinuity designs, the running variable used by the administrator to assign treatment is only observed with error. We show that, provided the observed running variable (i) correctly classifies the treatment assignment, and (ii) affects the conditional means of the potential outcomes smoothly, ignoring the measurement error nonetheless yields an estimate with a causal interpretation: the average treatment effect for units whose observed…

合成控制的识别与推断：近端因果推断框架AI 解读

Synthetic control (SC) methods are commonly used to estimate the treatment effect on a single treated unit in panel data settings. An SC is a weighted average of control units built to match the treated unit, with weights typically estimated by regressing (summaries of) pre-treatment outcomes and measured covariates of the treated unit to those of the control units. However, it has been established that in the absence of a good fit, such regression estimator will generally…

混合效应模型下选择偏差问题的软校准AI 解读

Calibration weighting has been widely used to correct selection biases in non-probability sampling, missing data, and causal inference. The main idea is to calibrate the biased sample to the benchmark by adjusting the subject weights. However, hard calibration can produce enormous weights when an exact calibration is enforced on a large set of extraneous covariates. This article proposes a soft calibration scheme, in which the outcome and the selection indicator follow…

合成双重差分估计的 Stata 实现AI 解读

In this paper, we describe a computational implementation of the Synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) estimator of Arkhangelsky et al. (2021) for Stata. Synthetic difference-in-differences can be used in a wide class of circumstances where treatment effects on some particular policy or event are desired, and repeated observations on treated and untreated units are available over time. We lay out the theory underlying SDID, both when there is a single treatment adoption…

在有向无环图中表示确定性变量：辅助识别与解释因果效应AI 解读

Deterministic variables are variables that are fully explained by one or more parent variables. They commonly arise when a variable has been algebraically constructed from one or more parent variables, as with composite variables, and in compositional data, where the 'whole' variable is determined from its 'parts'. This article introduces how deterministic variables may be depicted within directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to help with identifying and interpreting causal effects…

BaCaDI：干预目标未知时的贝叶斯因果发现AI 解读

Inferring causal structures from experimentation is a central task in many domains. For example, in biology, recent advances allow us to obtain single-cell expression data under multiple interventions such as drugs or gene knockouts. However, the targets of the interventions are often uncertain or unknown and the number of observations limited. As a result, standard causal discovery methods can no longer be reliably used. To fill this gap, we propose a Bayesian framework…

非参数条件局部独立性检验AI 解读

Conditional local independence is an asymmetric independence relation among continuous time stochastic processes. It describes whether the evolution of one process is directly influenced by another process given the histories of additional processes, and it is important for the description and learning of causal relations among processes. We develop a model-free framework for testing the hypothesis that a counting process is conditionally locally independent of another…

抵御混杂影响的稳健因果图表示学习AI 解读

The prevailing graph neural network models have achieved significant progress in graph representation learning. However, in this paper, we uncover an ever-overlooked phenomenon: the pre-trained graph representation learning model tested with full graphs underperforms the model tested with well-pruned graphs. This observation reveals that there exist confounders in graphs, which may interfere with the model learning semantic information, and current graph representation…

存在地区干扰时的政策相关因果效应估计：费城饮料税应用AI 解读

To comprehensively evaluate a public policy intervention, researchers must consider the effects of the policy not just on the implementing region, but also nearby, indirectly-affected regions. For example, an excise tax on sweetened beverages in Philadelphia was shown to not only be associated with a decrease in volume sales of taxed beverages in Philadelphia, but also an increase in sales in bordering counties not subject to the tax. The latter association may be explained…

图像混杂偏差下的因果效应估计及非洲贫困应用AI 解读

Observational studies of causal effects require adjustment for confounding factors. In the tabular setting, where these factors are well-defined, separate random variables, the effect of confounding is well understood. However, in public policy, ecology, and in medicine, decisions are often made in non-tabular settings, informed by patterns or objects detected in images (e.g., maps, satellite or tomography imagery). Using such imagery for causal inference presents an…

利用观测数据进行分布鲁棒因果推断AI 解读

We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds in two steps. We first specify the maximal degree to which the distribution of unobserved potential outcomes may deviate from that of observed outcomes. We then derive sharp bounds on the average treatment effects under this assumption.…

用于因果发现的元强化学习算法AI 解读

Causal discovery is a major task with the utmost importance for machine learning since causal structures can enable models to go beyond pure correlation-based inference and significantly boost their performance. However, finding causal structures from data poses a significant challenge both in computational effort and accuracy, let alone its impossibility without interventions in general. In this paper, we develop a meta-reinforcement learning algorithm that performs causal…

利用阶段树开展类别数据的情境特定因果发现AI 解读

Causal discovery algorithms aim at untangling complex causal relationships from data. Here, we study causal discovery and inference methods based on staged tree models, which can represent complex and asymmetric causal relationships between categorical variables. We provide a first graphical representation of the equivalence class of a staged tree, by looking only at a specific subset of its underlying independences. We further define a new pre-metric, inspired by the widely…

借助异质性处理效应估计器构建灵活高效的情境老虎机算法AI 解读

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate any function that explains the reward differences between actions, that is, the treatment effects. Motivated by this observation, building on recent work on oracle-based bandit algorithms, we provide the first reduction of contextual…

簇级有向无环图中的因果效应识别AI 解读

Reasoning about the effect of interventions and counterfactuals is a fundamental task found throughout the data sciences. A collection of principles, algorithms, and tools has been developed for performing such tasks in the last decades (Pearl, 2000). One of the pervasive requirements found throughout this literature is the articulation of assumptions, which commonly appear in the form of causal diagrams. Despite the power of this approach, there are significant settings…

隐私保护、通信高效且目标灵活的医院质量测量AI 解读

Integrating information from multiple data sources can enable more precise, timely, and generalizable decisions. However, it is challenging to make valid causal inferences using observational data from multiple data sources. For example, in healthcare, learning from electronic health records contained in different hospitals is desirable but difficult due to heterogeneity in patient case mix, differences in treatment guidelines, and data privacy regulations that preclude…

网络聚类稳健推断AI 解读

Since network data commonly consists of observations from a single large network, researchers often partition the network into clusters in order to apply cluster-robust inference methods. Existing such methods require clusters to be asymptotically independent. Under mild conditions, we prove that, for this requirement to hold for network-dependent data, it is necessary and sufficient that clusters have low conductance, the ratio of edge boundary size to volume. This yields a…